The Nurses Will Win: The New York Nurses’ Strike and a History of Healthcare Workers’ Struggles

Healthcare Worker Correspondent

Read our editorial on the significance of strikes here.

The strike by 15,000 New York City nurses is nearing its fourth week as bargaining has resumed between the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) and management of three of the city’s major hospital systems: Montefiore, Mount Sinai, and New York-Presbyterian.

Nurses went on strike starting on January 12, after the companies allowed the previous contract to expire, hell-bent on rolling back victories organized healthcare workers have secured in the past: guaranteed pay increases, maintaining health benefits, staff-to-patient ratios to ensure adequate care for patients and to prevent overwork for nurses, and job protection from AI. The nurses have persevered at the picket lines as the strike has gone on much longer than their previous strike in 2023, continuing even as a massive winter storm hit the city.

The hospital companies are claiming they can’t afford to pay for patient safety and nurses’ well-being, while, according to the union, their CEOs have made $26.3 million (Steven Corwin, New York-Presbyterian), $16.36 million (Philip Ozuah, Montefiore), and $7.2 million (Kenneth Davis, Mount Sinai) respectively, and are sitting on $1.6 billion in cash reserves across the three.

And, while crying about not being able to afford the nurses’ demands, the hospital monopolies are spending around $10 million weekly on “temporary workers” (scabs).

The trend around the struggle of healthcare workers show that each day the strike gets stronger, even as the enemy gets more vicious and disruptive. Alongside the cost of bringing in replacements and of having mediators drag out talks hemorrhaging hospital revenue, the number of workers on the picket line pressuring hospitals generally has increased with 31,000 Kaiser Permanente nurses on strike in California and Hawaii. The growing struggle raises the overall wages of nurses nationally, and indicates that sustaining the strike further can bring victory.

A Brief History of Healthcare Worker Strikes

New York’s healthcare labor struggles have shaped the broader movement for worker rights. Historically, the most militant strikes among healthcare workers have been carried out by the lower strata of workers, often who were mostly Black and Latino.

In 1959, technicians, pharmacists, aides, and janitorial workers waged a 46-day strike across several major hospitals in New York, including Montefiore and Mount Sinai, and won the first recognized contract for hospital workers.

The striking workers were part of Local 1199 of the Drug, Hospital and Health Care Employees Union, founded in 1932 by Leon Davis. 1199 organized drug stores at the time of its founding, picketing against racial discrimination in hiring and organizing across trade lines in the stores. The union remained relatively small until it began organizing hospital workers. At the time, workers in healthcare nonprofits were barred from collective bargaining in the state, and the 1959 strike was, in part, for union recognition by management of thousands of newly-organized hospital workers.

The workers persisted on the 1959 picket lines even after the strike was declared illegal and its organizers arrested, striking in the face of police violence until the hospitals were forced to concede to some demands, setting the stage for later union recognition.

Years before the strike, in 1948, the old-state accused Leon Davis of being a member of the so-called “Communist Party” USA, in an act of “red baiting” which sought to separate the workers from their leaders.

Davis would go on to merge 1199 with the SEIU in the decades following the strike, forming what is now SEIU1199. SEIU has since become the dominant national union for these workers in hospitals.

In the 1970s and 80s, finance capital acted to gut and “restructure” manufacturing, decimating the industrial working class and attacking hard won democratic and worker rights, and leading to an increase in employment in the healthcare and service sector where wages are low, absorbing in part the mass of unemployed workers created by the deepening crisis of imperialism. This led to hospital systems furthering their monopolization, developing into vertically organized private systems funded with federal and state dollars not only profiting off care, but also dominating insurance and going to manage specialty clinics and skilled nursing and rehab facilities. As the health of the working class was declining through the ruling class “crisis management” of cutting jobs and making cuts to healthcare and education, the pay and staffing levels for nurses also began to decline.

Increasingly facing attacks on their working conditions, nurses fought back. The Seattle Nurses’ Strike of 1976, which lasted 65 days, held static picket lines at hospital entrances and roving pickets wherever management went, disrupting operations as much as possible. As in 1959 in New York, nurses struck despite the old-state declaring the strike illegal, and in the face of police menacing the workers with dogs and horses. The striking nurses picketed outside of staffing agencies managing scabs, confronting the scabs as they went to get pay and exposing those who chose to scab.

There would be more strikes over the years thereafter, in Massachusetts, Ohio, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, New York and Oregon—with the number of organized hospitals increasing. A popular demand as a through line to today is the reform around winning patient ratios, key to better working conditions and patient safety—allowing nurses to give patients the time, attention and clinical ability to actually keep people alive.

During and after the surge of coronavirus patients from 2020, healthcare strikes picked up, including at some of the same 12 hospitals now on strike under NYSNA leadership. In 2023, a strike of roughly 7,000 workers lasted three days and forced several concessions from management, but with many among the rank-and-file critical of the agreement—43% of New York-Presbyterian nurses voted “no”, feeling that the union leadership ended the struggle too quickly and that the language in the agreement did not guarantee safe staffing ratios. Since then, the monopolies have continued to under-staff and otherwise not follow the contract. For instance, last December when contract negotiations were supposed to start with NYSNA, three workers were disciplined for raising workplace safety concerns.

The State Colludes With Management

Governor Kathy Hochul has helped to support the companies and has facilitated bringing in scabs. This is no surprise as she has received $2 million from the Greater New York Hospital Association (GNYHA), the lobbying organization these hospitals are part of. Hochul has acted as a lapdog of these companies with Executive Order 56, which has suspended license restrictions to permit out of state nurses to come and practice in New York easier—that is, allowing scabs to more easily be hired.

At this point, the government is funding strikebreakers through Medicaid and Medicare, reimbursing hospitals for hiring these scabs, and ironically at pay rates above what striking nurses are receiving. Currently, U.S. Nursing Corporation and AMN Healthcare/Health Source Global Staffing, Inc. are two of the scab agencies involved.

The Fight Goes On

The strike is a powerful tool in the hands of the working class to fight for our rights. Learning from the experience of past hospital workers’ and nurses’ strikes, where they had to operate under conditions of illegality, can be instructive. It wasn’t legalism and the toning down of class struggle that won those strikes, but nurses and healthcare workers seizing the streets and combating to scare off scabs, organizing to go beyond what is permissible by the forces who want to hold back the struggle.

Readers are encouraged to join the picket lines at these locations and to donate to the NYSNA Strike Hardship Fund.

Note: the article was updated 02/02/2026 to clarify the origins and history of SEIU1199 and the 2023 NYSNA strike, correcting inaccuracies due to editing mistakes.

Image: Nurses picket at the opening of the January 12 strike. NYSNA social media.

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